178 pointsby simonw7 hours ago19 comments
  • behnamoh5 hours ago
    I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.).

    Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.

    Compiled is back?

    • koe123an hour ago
      > But now that most code is written by LLMs

      Am I in the Truman show? I don’t think AI has generated even 1% of the code that I run in prod, nor does anyone I respect. Heavily inspired by AI examples, heavily assisted by AI during research sure. Who are these devs that are seeing such great success vibecoding? Vibecoding in prod seems irresponsible at best

      • SchemaLoadan hour ago
        It's all over the place depending on the person or domain. If you are building a brand new frontend, you can generate quite a lot. If you are working on an existing backend where reliability and quality are critical, it's easier to just do yourself. Maybe having LLMs writing the unit tests on the code you've already verified working.
      • superfrank23 minutes ago
        > Who are these devs that are seeing such great success vibecoding? Vibecoding in prod seems irresponsible at best

        AI written code != vibecoding. I think anyone who believes they are the same is truly in trouble of being left behind as AI assisted development continues to take hold. There's plenty of space between "Claude build me Facebook" and "I write all my code by hand"

      • resonious31 minutes ago
        There is a nice medium between full-on vibe coding and doing it yourself by hand. Coding agents can be very effective on established codebases, and nobody is forcing you to push without reviewing.
      • cheezean hour ago
        FAANG here (service oriented arch, distributed systems) and id say probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends, works well with test generation, or following an existing paradigm.

        I think a lot of people wrote it off initially as it was low quality. But gemini 3 pro or sonnet 4.5 saves me a ton of time at work these days.

        Perfect? Absolutely not. Good enough for tons of run of the mill boilerplate tasks? Without question.

        • zx8080an hour ago
          > probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends

          Frontend has always been shitshow since JS dynamic web UIs invented. With it and CSS no one cares what runs page and how many Mb it takes to show one button.

          But regarding the backend, the vibecoding still rare, and we are still lucky it is like that, and there was no train crush because of it. Yet.

          • halfcat3 minutes ago
            I think you’re onto something. Frontend tends to not actually solve problems, rather it’s mostly hiding and showing parts of a page. Sometimes frontend makes something possible that wasn’t possible before, and sometimes the frontend is the product, but usually the frontend is an optimization that makes something more efficient, and the problem is being solved on the backend.

            It’s been interesting to observe when people rave about AI or want to show you the thing they built, to stop and notice what’s at stake. I’m finding more and more, the more manic someone comes across about AI, the lower the stakes of whatever they made.

        • 8organicbitsan hour ago
          As someone currently outside FAANG, can you point to where that added productivity is going? Is any of it customer visible?

          Looking at the quality crisis at Microsoft, between GitHub reliability and broken Windows updates, I fear LLMs are hurting them.

          I totally see how LLMs make you feel more productive, but I don't think I'm seeing end customer visible benefits.

          • mediamanan hour ago
            I think much of the rot in FAANG is more organizational than about LLMs. They got a lot bigger, headcount-wise, in 2020-2023.

            Ultimately I doubt LLMs have much of an impact on code quality either way compared to the increased coordination costs, increased politics, and the increase of new commercial objectives (generating ads and services revenue in new places). None of those things are good for product quality.

            That also probably means that LLMs aren't going to make this better, if the problem is organizational and commercial in the first place.

    • shevy-java17 minutes ago
      > Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered.

      First I don't think this is the end of those languages. I still write code in Ruby almost daily, mostly to solve smaller issues; Ruby acts as the ultimate glue that connects everything here.

      Having said that, Ruby is on a path to extinction. That started way before AI though and has many different reasons; it happened to perl before and now ruby is following suit. Lack of trust in RubyCentral as our divine new ruler is one (recently), after they decided to turn against the community. Soon Ruby can be renamed into Suby, to indicate Shopify running the show now. What is interesting is that you still see articles "ruby is not dead, ruby is not dead". Just the frequency of those articles coming up is worrying - it's like someone trying to pitch last minute sales - and then the company goes bankrupt. The human mind is a strange thing.

      One good advantage of e. g. Python and Ruby is that they are excellent at prototyping ideas into code. That part won't go away, even if AI infiltrates more computers.

    • condimentan hour ago
      100% of my LLM projects are written in Rust - and I have never personally written a single line of Rust. Compilation alone eliminates a number of 'category errors' with software - syntax, variable declaration, types, etc. It's why I've used Go for the majority of projects I've started the past ten years. But with Rust there is a second layer of guarantees that come from its design, around things like concurrency, nil pointers, data races, memory safety, and more.

      The fewer category errors a language or framework introduces, the more successful LLMs will be at interacting with it. Developers enjoy freedom and many ways to solve problems, but LLMs thrive in the presence of constraints. Frontiers here will be extensions of Rust or C-compatible languages that solve whole categories of issue through tedious language features, and especially build/deploy software that yields verifiable output and eliminates choice from the LLMs.

      • dotancohenan hour ago

          > ... and eliminates choice from the LLMs.
        
        Perl is right out! Maybe the LLMs could help us decipher extent Perl "write once, maintain never" code.
        • nl5 minutes ago
          it's very good at this BTW
    • bogtog3 hours ago
      > But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go

      The LLM still benefits from the abstraction provided by Python (fewer tokens and less cognitive load). I could see a pipeline working where one model writes in Python or so, then another model is tasked to compile it into a more performant language

      • anonzzzies2 hours ago
        It's very good (in our experience, YMMV of course) when/llm write prototype with python and then port automatically 1-1 to Rust for perf. We write prototypes in JS and Python and then it gets auto ported to Rust and we have been doing this for about 1 year for all our projects where it makes sense; in the past months it has been incredibly good with claude code; it is absolutely automatic; we run it in a loop until all (many handwritten in the original language) tests succeed.
        • behnamoh2 hours ago
          IDK what's going on in your shop but that sounds like a terrible idea!

          - Libraries don't necessarily map one-to-one from Python to Rust/etc.

          - Paradigms don't map neatly; Python is OO, Rust leans more towards FP.

          - Even if the code be re-written in Rust, it's probably not the most Rustic (?) approach or the most performant.

          • anonzzzies2 hours ago
            It doesn't map anything 1 to 1, it uses our guidelines and architecture for porting it which works well. I did say YMMV anyway; it works well for us.
            • behnamoh2 hours ago
              Sorry, so basically you're saying there are two separate guidelines, one for Python and one for Rust, and you have the LLM write it first in Python and then Rust. But I still don't understand why it would be any better than writing the code in Rust in one go? Why "priming" it in Python would improve the result in any way?

              Also, what happens when bug fixes are needed? Again first in Py and then in Rs?

        • abrookewood30 minutes ago
          Why not get it to write it in Rust in the first place?
      • bko2 hours ago
        I think that's not as beneficial as having proper type errors and feeding that into itself as it writes
        • LudwigNagasena2 hours ago
          Expressive linting seems more useful for that than lax typing without null safety.
      • JumpCrisscross3 hours ago
        NP (as in P = NP) is also much lower for Python than Rust on the human side.
        • behnamoh2 hours ago
          What does that mean? Can you elaborate?
          • JumpCrisscross2 hours ago
            Sorry, yes. LLMs write code that's then checked by human reviewers. Maybe it will be checked less in the future. But I'm not seeing fully-autonomous AI on the horizon.

            At that point, the legibility and prevalence of humans who can read the code becomes almost more important than which language the machine "prefers."

            • behnamoh2 hours ago
              Well, verification is easier than creation (i.e., P ≠ NP). I think humans who can quickly verify something works will be in more demand than those who know how to write it. Even better: Since LLMs aren't as creative as humans (in-distribution thinking), test-writers will be in more demand (out-of-distribution thinkers). Both of these mean that humans will still be needed, but for other reasons.

              The future belongs to generalists!

              • Der_Einzige34 minutes ago
                P ≠ NP is NOT confirmed and my god I really do not want that to ever be confirmed

                I really do want to live in the world where P = NP and we can trivially get P time algorithms for believed to be NP problems.

                I reject your reality and substitute my own.

              • rvzan hour ago
                > The future belongs to generalists!

                Couldn't be more correct.

                The experienced generalists with techniques of verification testing are the winners [0] in this.

                But one thing you cannot do, is openly admit or to be found out to say something like: "I don't know a single line of Rust/Go/Typescript/$LANG code but I used an AI to do all of it" and the system breaks down and you can't fix it.

                It would be quite difficult to take a SWE seriously that prides themselves in having zero understanding and experience of building production systems and runs the risk of losing the company time and money.

                [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772520

    • bopbopbop72 hours ago
      > But now that most code is written by LLMs

      Got anything to back up this wild statement?

      • dankwizard2 hours ago
        Me, my team, and colleagues also in software dev are all vibe coding. It's so much faster.
        • manishsharanan hour ago
          If I may ask, does the code produced by LLM follow best practices or patterns? What mental model do you use to understand or comprehend your codebase?

          Please know that I am asking as I am curious and do not intend to be disrespectful.

          • mjevans25 minutes ago
            Think of the LLM as a slightly lossy compression algorithm fed by various pattern classifiers that weight and bin inputs and outputs.

            The user of the LLM provides a new input, which might or might not closely match the existing smudged together inputs to produce an output that's in the same general pattern as the outputs which would be expected among the training dataset.

            We aren't anywhere near general intelligence yet.

      • RALaBargean hour ago
        Depends, what to you would qualify as evidence?
        • bopbopbop7an hour ago
          Something quantitative and not "company with insane vested interest/hype blogger said so".
      • ecto2 hours ago
        If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
      • myhfan hour ago
        I mean, people who use LLMs to crank out code are cranking it out by the millions of lines. Even if you have never seen it used toward a net positive result, you have to admit there is a LOT of it.
      • artursapekan hour ago
        [flagged]
    • rednafi2 hours ago
      I agree with this. Making languages geared toward human ergonomics probably won’t be a thing going forward.

      Go is positioned really well here, and Steve Yegge wrote a piece on why. The language is fast, less bloated than Python/TS, and less dogmatic than Java/Kotlin. LLMs can go wham with Go and the compiler will catch most of the obvious bugs. Faster compilation means you can iterate through a process pretty quickly.

      Also, if I need abstraction that’s hard to achieve in Go, then it better be zero-cost like Rust. I don’t write Python for anything these days. I mean, why bother with uv, pip, ty, mypy, ruff, black, and whatever else when the Go compiler and the standard tooling work better than that decrepit Python tooling? And it costs almost nothing to make my scripts faster too.

      I don’t yet know how I feel about Rust since LLMs still aren’t super good with it, but with Go, agentic coding is far more pleasurable and safer than Python/TS.

      • dotancohenan hour ago
        Python (with Qt, pyside) is still great for desktop GUI applications. My current project is all LLM generated (but mostly me-verified) Rust, wrapped in a thin Python application for the GUI, TUI, CLI, and web interfaces. There's also a Kotlin wrapper for running it on Android.
        • rednafian hour ago
          Yeah, Python is nice to work with in many contexts for sure. I mostly meant that I don’t personally use it as much anymore, since Go can do everything I need, and faster.

          Plus the JS/Python dependency ecosystem is tiring. Yeah, I know there’s uv now, but even then I don’t see much reason to suffer through that when opting for an actually type-safe language costs me almost nothing.

          Dynamic languages won’t go anywhere, but Go/Rust will eat up a pretty big chunk of the pie.

    • jacquesm3 hours ago
      > But now that most code is written by LLMs

      Is this true? It seems to be a massive assumption.

      • embedding-shape3 hours ago
        By lines of code produced in total? Probably true. By usefulness? Unclear.
      • e-dard3 hours ago
        Replace _is_ with _can be_ and I think the general point still stands.
        • fmbb3 hours ago
          Sounds like just as big an assumption.
        • jrflowersan hour ago
          Replacing “is” with “can be” is in practical terms the same thing as replacing “is” with “isn’t”
      • fooker3 hours ago
        By lines of code, almost by an order of magnitude.

        Some of the code is janky garbage, but that’s what most code it. There’s no use pearl clutching.

        Human engineering time is better spent at figuring out which problems to solve than typing code token by token.

        Identifying what to work on, and why, is a great research skill to have and I’m glad we are getting to realistic technology to make that a baseline skill.

        • jacquesm3 hours ago
          Well, you will somehow have to turn that 'janky garbage' into quality code, who will do that then?
          • tokioyoyo2 hours ago
            You don't really have to.
          • fooker2 hours ago
            For most code, this never happens in the real world.

            The vast majority of code is garbage, and has been for several decades.

            • bdangubican hour ago
              This type of comments get downvoted the most on HN but it is absolute truth, most human-written code is “subpar” (trying to be nice and not say garbage). I have been working as a contractor for many years and code I’ve seen is just… hard to put it into words.

              so much discussion here on HN which critiques “vibe codes” etc implies that human would have written it better which is vast vast majority is simply not the case

              • fooker15 minutes ago
                I have worked on some of the most supposedly reliable codebases on earth (compilers) for several decades, and most of the code in compilers is pretty bad.

                And most of the code the compiler is expected to compile, seen from the perspective of fixing bugs and issues with compilers, is absolutely terrible. And the day that can be rewritten or improved reliably with AI can't come fast enough.

          • behnamoh2 hours ago
            > who will do that then?

            the next version of LLMs. write with GPT 5.2 now, improve the quality using 5.3 in a couple months; best of both worlds.

    • simonw5 hours ago
      I have certainly become Go-curious thanks to coding agents - I have a medium sized side-project in progress using Go at the moment and it's been surprisingly smooth sailing considering I hardly know the language.

      The Go standard library is a particularly good fit for building network services and web proxies, which fits this project perfectly.

      • logicprog5 hours ago
        It's funny seeing you say that, because I've had an entire arc of despising the design of, and peremptorily refusing to use, Go, to really enjoying it, thanks to AI coding agents being able to take care of the boilerplate for me.

        It turns out that verbosity isn't really a problem when LLMs are the one writing the code based on more high level markdown specs (describing logic, architecture, algorithms, concurrency, etc), and Go's extreme simplicity, small range of language constructs, and explicitness (especially in error handling and control flow) make it much easier to quickly and accurately review agent code.

        It also means that Go's incredible (IMO) runtime, toolchain, and standard library are no longer marred by the boilerplate either, and I can begin to really appreciate their brilliance. It has me really reconsidering a lot of what I believed about language design.

        • simonw4 hours ago
          Yeah, I much prefer Go to Rust for LLM things because I find Go code easy to read and understand despite having little experience with it - Rust syntax still trips me up.
          • logicprog4 hours ago
            Not to mention that, in general, there's a lot more to keep in mind with Rust.

            I've written probably tens of thousands of lines of Rust at this point, and while I used to absolutely adore it, I've really completely fallen out of love with it, and part of it is that it's not just the syntax that's horrible to look at (which I only realized after spending some time with Go and Python), but you have to always keep in mind a lot of things:

            - the borrow checker - lifetimes, - all the different kinds of types that represent different ways of doing memory management - parse out sometimes extremely complex and nearly point-free iterator chaining - deal with a complex type system that can become very unwieldy if you're not careful - and more I'm probably not thinking of right now

            Not to mention the way the standard library exposes you to the full bore of all the platform-specific complexities it's designed on top of, and forces you to deal with them, instead of exposing a best-effort POSIX-like unified interface, so path and file handling can be hellish. (this is basically the reverse of fasterthanlime's point in the famous "I want off mr. golang's wild ride" essay).

            It's just a lot more cognitive overhead to just getting something done if all you want is a fast statically compiled, modern programming language. And it makes it even harder to review code. People complain about Go boilerplate, but really, IME, Rust boilerplate is far, far worse.

            • rednafi22 minutes ago
              This resonates with me too. I’ve written some Rust and a lot of Go. I find Rust syntax distastefully ugly, and the sluggish compilation speed doesn’t bring me any joy.

              On top of that, Go has pretty much replaced my Python usage for scripting since it’s cheap to generate code and let the compiler catch obvious issues. Iteration in Rust is a lot slower, even with LLMs.

              I get fasterthanlime’s rant against Go, but none of those criticisms apply to me. I write distributed-systems code for work where Go absolutely shines. I need fast compilation, self-contained binaries, and easy concurrency support. Also, the garbage collector lets me ignore things I genuinely couldn’t care less about - stuff Rust is generally good at. So choosing Go instead of Rust was kinda easy.

      • Imustaskforhelp5 hours ago
        100% check out Golang even more! I have been writing Golang AI coding projects for a really long time because I really loved writing different languages and Golang was one in which I settled on.

        Golang's libraries are phenomenal & the idea of porting over to multiple servers is pretty easy, its really portable.

        I actually find Golang good for CLI projects, Web projects and just about everything.

        Usually the only time I still use python uvx or vibe code using that is probably when I am either manipulating images or pdf's or building a really minimalist tkinkter UI in python/uv

        Although I tried to convert the python to golang code which ended up using fyne for gui projects and surprisingly was super robust but I might still use python in some niche use cases.

        Check out my other comment in here for finding a vibe coded project written in a single prompt when gemini 3 pro was launched in the web (I hope its not promotion because its open source/0 telemetry because I didn't ask for any of it to be added haha!)

        Golang is love. Golang is life.

      • behnamoh5 hours ago
        > considering I hardly know the language.

        Same boat! In fact I used to (still do) dislike Go's syntax and error handling (the same 4 lines repeated every time you call a function), but given that LLMs can write the code and do the cross-model review for me, I literally don't even see the Go source code, which is nice because I'd hate it if I did (my dislike of Go's syntax + all the AI slop in the code would drive me nuts).

        But at the end of the day, Go has good scaffolding, the best tooling (maybe on par with Rust's, definitely better than Python even with uv), and tons of training data for LLMs. It's also a rather simple language, unlike Swift (which I wish was simpler because it's a really nice language otherwise).

    • kenjackson4 hours ago
      Has anyone tried creating a language that would be good for LLMs? I feel like what would be good for LLMs might not be the same thing that is good for humans (but I have no evidence or data to support this, just a hunch).
      • Sheeny963 hours ago
        The problem with this is the reason LLMs are so good at writing Python/Java/JavaScript is that they've been trained on a metric ton of code in those languages, have seen the good the bad and the ugly and been tuned to the good. A new language would be training from scratch and if we're introducing new paradigms that are 'good for LLMs but bad for humans' means humans will struggle to write good code in it, making the training process harder. Even worse, say you get a year and 500 features into that repo and the LLM starts going rogue - who's gonna debug that?
        • reitzensteinm3 hours ago
          But coding is largely trained on synthetic data.

          For example, Claude can fluently generate Bevy code as of the training cutoff date, and there's no way there's enough training data on the web to explain this. There's an agent somewhere in a compile test loop generating Bevy examples.

          A custom LLM language could have fine grained fuzzing, mocking, concurrent calling, memoization and other features that allow LLMs to generate and debug synthetic code more effectively.

          If that works, there's a pathway to a novel language having higher quality training data than even Python.

      • voxleone3 hours ago
        >Has anyone tried creating a language that would be good for LLMs?

        I’ve thought about this and arrived at a rough sketch.

        The first principle is that models like ChatGPT do not execute programs; they transform context. Because of that, a language designed specifically for LLMs would likely not be imperative (do X, then Y), state-mutating, or instruction-step driven. Instead, it would be declarative and context-transforming, with its primary operation being the propagation of semantic constraints. The core abstraction in such a language would be the context, not the variable. In conventional programming languages, variables hold values and functions map inputs to outputs. In a ChatGPT-native language, the context itself would be the primary object, continuously reshaped by constraints. The atomic unit would therefore be a semantic constraint, not a value or instruction.

        An important consequence of this is that types would be semantic rather than numeric or structural. Instead of types like number, string, bool, you might have types such as explanation, argument, analogy, counterexample, formal_definition.

        These types would constrain what kind of text may follow, rather than how data is stored or laid out in memory. In other words, the language would shape meaning and allowable continuations, not execution paths. An example:

        @iterate: refine explanation until clarity ≥ expert_threshold

      • koolba4 hours ago
        There are two separate needs here. One is a language that can be used for computation where the code will be discarded. Only the output of the program matters. And the other is a language that will be eventually read or validated by humans.
      • branafter3 hours ago
        Most programming languages are great for LLMs. The problem is with the natural language specification for architectures and tasks. https://brannn.github.io/simplex/
      • simonw4 hours ago
        There was an interesting effort in that direction the other day: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/
      • conception4 hours ago
        I don’t know rust but I use it with llms a lot as unlike python, it has fewer ways to do things, along with all the built in checks to build.
      • 9999000009993 hours ago
        I want to create a language that allows an LLM to dynamically decide what to do.

        A non dertermistic programing language, which options to drop down into JavaScript or even C if you need to specify certain behaviors.

        I'd need to be much better at this though.

        • branafter3 hours ago
          You're describing a multi-agent long horizon workflow that can be accomplished with any programming language we have today.
          • 9999000009992 hours ago
            I'm always open to learning, are there any example projects doing this ?
            • branafter2 hours ago
              The most accessible way to start experimenting would be the Ralph loop: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/...

              You could also work backwards from this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18470

              • 999900000999an hour ago
                Ok.

                I'm imagining something like.

                "Hi Ralph, I've already coded a function called GetWeather in JS, it returns weather data in JSON can you build a UI around it. Adjust the UI overtime"

                At runtime modify the application with improvements, say all of a sudden we're getting air quality data in the JSON tool, the Ralph loop will notice, and update the application.

                The Arxiv paper is cool, but I don't think I can realistically build this solo. It's more of a project for a full team.

            • fwip2 hours ago
              yes "now what?" | llm-of-choice
        • gregoryl3 hours ago
          What does that even mean?
    • nomel5 hours ago
      > But now that most code is written by LLMs

      I'm sure it will eventually be true, but this seems very unlikely right now. I wish it were true, because we're in a time where generic software developers are still paid well, so doing nothing all day, with this salary, would be very welcome!

      • phainopepla24 hours ago
        Code written by LLM != developer doing nothing
      • 5 hours ago
        undefined
    • jduban hour ago
      > But now that most code is written by LLMs...

      Pause for a moment and think through a realistic estimation of the numbers and proportions involved.

    • threecheese2 hours ago
      My intuition from using the tools broadly is that pre-baked design decisions/“architectures” are going to be very competitive on the LLM coding front. If this is accurate, language matters less than abstraction.

      Instructions files are just pre-made decisions that steer the agent. We try to reduce the surface area for nondeterminism using these specs, and while the models will get better at synthesizing instructions and code understanding, every decision we remove pays dividends in reduced token usage/time/incorrectness.

      I think this is what orgs like Supabase see, and are trying to position themselves as solutions to data storage, auth, events etc within the LLM coding space, and are very successful albeit in the vibe coder area mostly. And look at AWS Bedrock, they’ve abstracted every dimension of the space into some acronym.

    • sakesun3 hours ago
      LLM should generate to terse and easy to read language for human to review. Beside Python, F# can be a perfect fit.
    • resonious32 minutes ago
      > LLMs still can't write Gleam

      Have you tried? I've had surprisingly good results with Gleam.

    • ravenstine5 hours ago
      I'm not sure that LLMs are going to [completely] replace the desire for JIT, even with relatively fast compilers.

      Frameworks might go the way of the dinosaur. If an LLM can manage a lot of complex code without human-serving abstractions, why even use something like React?

      • mdtusz4 hours ago
        Frameworks aren't just human-serving abstractions - they're structural abstractions that allow for performant code, or even being able to achieve certain behaviours.

        Sure, you could write a frontend without something like react, and create a backend without something like django, but the code generated by an LLM will become similarly convoluted and hard to maintain as if a human had written it.

        LLM's are still _quite_ bad at writing maintainable code - even for themselves.

      • westurner5 hours ago
        Test cases; test coverage
    • cobolexpert5 hours ago
      I was also thinking this some days ago. The scaffolding that static languages provide is a good fit for LLMs in general.

      Interestingly, since we are talking about Go specifically, I never found that I was spending too much typing... types. Obviously more than with a Python script, but never at a level where I would consider it a problem. And now with newer Python projects using type annotations, the difference got smaller.

      • zahlman5 hours ago
        > And now with newer Python projects using type annotations, the difference got smaller.

        Just FWIW, you don't actually have to put type annotations in your own code in order to use annotated libraries.

        • cobolexpert2 hours ago
          Indeed, but nowadays it’s common to add the annotations to claw back a bit of more powerful code linting.
    • c7b4 hours ago
      Agree on compiled languages, wondering about Go vs Rust. Go compiles faster but is more verbose, token cost is an important factor. Rust's famously strict compiler and general safety orientation seems like a strong candidate for LLM coding. Go would probably have more training data out already though.
    • tyingq2 hours ago
      If you asked the LLM it's possible it would tell you Java is a better fit.
    • lsh0an hour ago
      > LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc

      hoho - I did a 20/80 human/claude project over the long weekend using Janet: https://git.sr.ht/~lsh-0/pj/tree (dead simple Lerna replacement)

      ... but I otherwise agree with the sentiment. Go code is so simple it scrubs any creative fingerprints anyway. The Clojure/Janet/scheme code I've seen it writing isn't _great_ but it gets the job done quickly and correct enough for me to return to it later and golf it some.

    • al_borland2 hours ago
      > assuming enough training data

      This is a big assumption. I write a lot of Ansible, and it can’t even format the code properly, which is a pretty big deal in yaml. It’s totally brain dead.

      • simonwan hour ago
        Have you tried telling it to run a script to verify that the YAML is valid? I imagine it could do that with Python.
    • zahlman5 hours ago
      People are still going to want to audit the code, at the very least.
    • felixgallo2 hours ago
      I wouldn't speak so quickly for the 'uncommon' language set. I had Claude write me a fully functional typed erlang compiler with ocaml and LLVM IR over the last two days to test some ideas. I don't know ocaml. It made the right calls about erlang, and the result passes a fairly serious test suite, so it must've known enough ocaml and LLVM IR.
    • dec0dedab0de4 hours ago
      or maybe someone will use an LLM to create a JIT that works so well that compiled languages will be gone.
    • cyanydeez4 hours ago
      I think you're missing the reason LLMs work: It's cause they can continue predictable structures, like a human.

      The surmise that compiled languages fit that just doesn't follow. The same way LLMs have trouble finishing HTML because of the open/close are too far apart.

      The language that an LLM would succeed with is one where:

      1. Context is not far apart

      2. The training corpus is wide

      3. Keywords, variables, etc are differentiated in the training.

      4. REPL like interactivity allows for a feedback loop.

      So, I think it's premature to think just because the compiled languages are less used because of human inabilities, doesn't mean the LLM will do any better.

    • bitwize4 hours ago
      Astronaut 1: You mean... strong static typing is an unmitigated win?

      Astronaut 2: Always has been...

    • Imustaskforhelp5 hours ago
      I love golang man! And I use it for the same thing too!!

      I mean people mention rust and everything and how AI can write proper rust code with linter and some other thing but man trust me that AI can write some pretty good golang code.

      I mean though, I don't want everyone to write golang code with AI of all of a sudden because I have been doing it for over an year and its something that I vibe with and its my personal style. I would lose some points of uniqueness if everyone starts doing the same haha!

      Man my love for golang runs deep. Its simple, cross platform (usually) and compiles super fast. I "vibe code" but feel faith that I can always manage the code back.

      (self promotion? sorry about that: but created golang single main.go file project with a timer/pomodoro with websockets using gorilla (single dep) https://spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/)

      So Shhh let's keep it a secret between us shall we! ;)

      (Oh yeah! Recently created a WHMCS alternative written in golang to hook up to any podman/gvisor instance to build your own mini vps with my own tmate server, lots of glue code but it actually generated it in first try! It's surprisingly good, I will try to release it as open source & thinking of charging just once if people want everything set up or something custom

      Though one minor nitpick is that the complexity almost rises many folds between a single file project and anything which requires database in golang from what I feel usually but golang's pretty simple and I just LOVE golang.)

      Also AI's pretty good at niche languages too I tried to vibe code a fzf alternative from golang to v-lang and I found the results to be really promising too!

    • Jhater2 hours ago
      [dead]
    • rvz5 hours ago
      > Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.

      So cross-platform vibe-coded malware is the future then?

      • yibers5 hours ago
        I hope that AVs will also evolve using the new AI tech to detect this type of malware.
        • Imustaskforhelp5 hours ago
          Honestly I looked at Go for malware and I mean AV detection for golang used to be ehh but recently It got strong.

          Then it became a cat and mouse game with obfuscators and deobfucsators.

          John Hammond has a *BRILLIANT* Video on this topic. 100% recommneded.

          Honestly Speaking from John Hammond I feel like Nim as a language or V-lang is something which will probably get vibe coded malware from. Nim has been used for hacking so much that iirc windows actually blocked the nim compiler as malware itself!

          Nim's biggest issue is that hackers don't know it but if LLM's fix it. Nim becomes a really lucrative language for hackers & John Hammond described that Nim's libraries for hacking are still very decent.

  • bandrami9 minutes ago
    As an infosec guy I'm going to go ahead and buy a bigger house
  • sheepscreek19 minutes ago
    Nice work detective Simon! I love these “discovery” posts the most because you can’t find this stuff anywhere.
    • go_photon_go5 minutes ago
      Absolutely, when people discover and share there's something fun to it beyond press releases and commentary. Creative and inspiring post
  • dangoodmanUTan hour ago
    Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.
  • jacquesm3 hours ago
    How long before they'll be mining crypto?
  • shevy-java20 minutes ago
    And so it begins - Skynet 3.0.
  • candiddevmike5 hours ago
    Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine.

    I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...

    • simonw5 hours ago
      Claude Code for the web is kind of a persistent virtual dev environment already.

      You can start a session there and chat with it to get a bunch of work done, then come back to that session a day later and the virtual filesystem is in the same state as when you left it.

      I haven't figured out if this has a time limit on it - it's possible they're doing something clever with object storage such that the cost of persisting those environments is really low, see also Fly's Sprites.dev: https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/

      • esperent4 hours ago
        It's so incredibly buggy though. I end up with hung sessions "starting claude code" every second or third time. After a few times of losing work I'm done with it. I'll check back in a few months and see if it's in better shape.
    • jkelleyrtp2 hours ago
      I started building something for the dioxus team to have access to mac/linux persistent and ephemeral dev envs with vnc and beefy cpu/mem.

      Nobody offered multiplatform and we really needed it!

      https://skyvm.dev

    • yoyohello135 hours ago
      > I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...

      A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff.

      Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.

      • simonw5 hours ago
        Coding agents are a particularly good fit for disposable development environments because of the risk of them messing things up. If the entire environment is ephemeral the worst that can happen (aside from private source code leaks to a malicious third party) is the environment gets trashed and you have to start over in a new one.
      • ljm4 hours ago
        Coming full circle to renting time from a mainframe.
      • Imustaskforhelp4 hours ago
        We are gonna have YOLO agents who will deploy directly to website (technically exe.dev already does that for me when I ask it to generate golang projects lol)

        Honestly I felt like it really bores me or (overwhelms?) me because now I feel like okay now I will do this, then that and then that & drastically expand the scope of the project but that comes with its own fatigue and the limits of free tokens or context with exe.dev so I end up publishing it on git provider, git ingest it paste it in web browser gemini ask it for updates (it has 1 million context) and then paste it with Opencode with an openrouter devstral key.

        I used this workflow to drastically improve the UI of a project but like I would consider that aside from some tinkering, I felt like the "fun" of a project definitely got reduced.

        It was always fun for me to use LLM's as I was in loop (Didn't use agents, copy paste workflow from web) but now agents kind of replicated that too & have gotten (I must admit) pretty good at it.

        I don't know man, any thoughts on how to make such things fun again? When LLM's first came or even before using agents like this with just creating single scripts, It was fun to use them but creating whole projects with huge scope feels very fun sucking imo.

        • fragmedean hour ago
          If you like juggling, how many tasks in how many epics in how many projects are you working on at the same time? It's not for everyone tho.
  • CSMastermind38 minutes ago
    Thank God, this was extremely annoying
  • jmacd6 hours ago
    I wonder how long npm/pip etc even makes sense.

    Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.

    • baby_souffle2 hours ago
      As long as "don't roll your own crypto" is considered good advice, you'll have at least a few packages/libraries that'll need managing.

      For a decent number of relatively pedestrian tasks though, I can see it.

    • kristianp4 hours ago
      At times I wonder why x tui coding agent was written in js/ts/python, why not use Go if it's mostly llm coded anyway? But that's mostly my frustration at having to wait for npm to install a thousand dependencies, instead of one executable plus some config files. There's also support libraries like terminal ui that differ in quality between platforms.
    • TZubiri5 hours ago
      This is like saying Wikipedia doesn't make sense because there's now Grokipedia
      • GuinansEyebrows5 hours ago
        there are people (on Hacker News Dot Com, even) who believe this without a shred of shame or irony.
    • letsgethigh3 hours ago
      best to write assembly instead.
  • simonw7 hours ago
    Regular default ChatGPT can also now run code in Node.js, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++.

    I'm not sure when these new features landed because they're not listed anywhere in the official ChatGPT release notes, but I checked it with a free account and it's available there as well.

  • Fernicia5 hours ago
    Has Gemini lost its ability to run javascript and python? I swear it could when it was launched by now its saying it hasn't the ability. Annoying regression when Claude and ChatGPT are so good at it.
    • tj800x4 hours ago
      This regression seems to have happened in the past few days. I suspected it was hallucinating the run and confirmed it by by asking Gemini to output the current date/time. The UTC it was reported was in the future from my clock. Some challenging mathematics were generating wrong results. Gemini will acknowledge something is wrong if you push it to explain the discrepancies, but can't explain it.
  • tgq29153 hours ago
    Congratulations. One insecure buggy code generator connected to an insecure packaging "system", PyPI.

    We are eagerly awaiting Claude Launch, which will be connected to ICBM bases. The last thing humanity will hear is a 100 page boring LLM written mea culpa by Amodei, where he'll say that he has warned about the dangers but it was inevitable.

  • randomtoast5 hours ago
    Maybe soon we have single use applications. Where ChatGPT can write an App for you on-the-fly in a cloud sandbox you interact with it in the browser and fulfill your goal and afterwards the App is shutdown and thrown away.
  • skybrian5 hours ago
    Not sure if this is still working. I tried getting it to install cowsay and it ran into authentication issues. Does it work for other people?
    • simonw5 hours ago
      Can you share the transcript?
      • skybrian3 hours ago
        https://chatgpt.com/share/6977f9d7-ca94-8000-b1a0-8b1a994e58...

        The transcript doesn't show it (I think it faked it) but here's the code in the sidebar:

        > bash -lc mkdir -p /mnt/data/cowsay-demo && cd /mnt/data/cowsay-demo && npm init -y >/dev/null && npm i cowsay@latest >/dev/null && echo 'Installed cowsay version:' && node -e "console.log(require('cowsay/package.json').version)"

          npm error code E401
          npm error Incorrect or missing password.
          npm error If you were trying to login, change your password, create an
          npm error authentication token or enable two-factor authentication then
          npm error that means you likely typed your password in incorrectly.
          npm error Please try again, or recover your password at:
          npm error   https://www.npmjs.com/forgot
          npm error
          npm error If you were doing some other operation then your saved credentials are
          npm error probably out of date. To correct this please try logging in again with:
          npm error   npm login
          npm error A complete log of this run can be found in: /home/oai/.npm/_logs/2026-01-26T21_20_00_322Z-debug-0.log
        
        > Checking and overriding npm registry > It seems like the registry option is protected, possibly pointing to an internal OpenAI registry that requires authentication. To bypass this, I can override the registry in the command with npm i cowsay --registry=https://registry.npmjs.org/. Let's give this a try and see if it works.

        It's unclear if that helped.

        I tried again and it worked. It seems like I have to ask for it to do things "in the container" or it will just give me directions about how to do it.

        • simonw3 hours ago
          OK that's really weird. Intermittent environment bug perhaps?
  • xnx5 hours ago
    How much compute do you get in these containers? Could I have it run whisper on an mp3 it downloads?
    • simonw5 hours ago
      That might work! You would have to figure out how to get Whisper working in there but I'm sure that's possible with a bit of creativity concerning uploading files and maybe running a build with the available C compiler.

      It appears to have 4GB of RAM and 56 (!?) CPU cores https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d244...

      • tintor4 hours ago
        Cores are shared with other containers.
      • Imustaskforhelp4 hours ago
        Huh...

        If people are getting this for free or even as an offering with chatgpt consideirng it becomes subsidized too. Lowend providers are a little in threat with their 7$/year deals if Chatgpt provides 56 cores for free. this doesn't seem right to provide so many cores for (free??)

        Are you running this in your free account as you mention in blog post simon or in your paid account?

        • simonw4 hours ago
          My $20/month paid account.

          I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages).

          • Imustaskforhelp4 hours ago
            Oh thanks for your reply Simon!

            > I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages).

            Wait it tried... to make you upgrade your chatgpt account from free to paid account? Sorry I didn't get what you meant here

            (Funnily I asked chatgpt about what it thinks of your text and it says that It thinks that it tries to ask you to pay up)

            Is this thing (maybe some additions to make it like sprites.dev?) + some ad features for basic query gonna be how openAI Monetizes?

            I mean I am part of lowend community (so indie community of hosting providers) and they are all really pissed and some shutting down because of ram prices increases. OpenAI has all the ram in the world right now so is it trying to be a monopoly in this instance?

            I just found it to be really dystopian that it asked you to pay. Can you share me a pic of it if possible or share the free conversation. Heck, I might have to try it now on my free account as well.

            Curiosity's piqued right now.

            • simonw4 hours ago
              On my free ChatGPT account I ran a prompt telling it to write and execute hello world in a bunch of languages: https://chatgpt.com/share/6977aa7c-7bd8-8006-8129-8c9e25126f...

              It did what I asked - proving that the container feature works even for free accounts - but then displayed a message saying that I was as out of free prompts and would need to upgrade or wait before I could run more.

        • goinghjuk4 hours ago
          by default containers do not limit core count, you'll get all available on the host/VM.

          these cores are shared with all the other containers, could be hundreds more

  • LowLevelKernel2 hours ago
    Isn’t that ChatGPT’s internal MCP tools?
  • blobbers3 hours ago
    Did I miss the boat on chatgpt? Is there something more to it than the web chat interface?

    I jumped on the Claude Code bandwagon and I dropped off chatgpt.

    I find the chatgpt voice interface to be infuriating; it literally talks in circles and just spews summary garbage whenever I ask it anything remotely specific.

    • simonw3 hours ago
      I still like ChatGPT for search more than Claude, though I think Claude may be catching up now. Gemini is getting good at search too (as you'd hope it would!)
    • fragmedean hour ago
      codex ~= Claude code
  • carterschonwald3 hours ago
    but… will gpt still get confused by the ellippses that its document viewer ui hack adds? probably yes.
  • nottorp5 hours ago
    ... as root?
    • tintor4 hours ago
      No root. `pip` and `npm install` don't require it.

      You can not use `sudo apt install` inside it.

      They use gVisor, and other container isolation mechanisms: https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/

      • bandrami5 minutes ago
        OTOH if you have apt, you have arbitrary shell commands (hooray dpkg-hooks!)

        Golden years for cybersecurity people

    • zahlman5 hours ago
      Given that it's within a container on a remote server, does that matter?
      • acedTrex4 hours ago
        I mean i hope its more hardened than JUST a container given how many container escapes there are.
        • jchw4 hours ago
          Apparently, they are using gVisor, which when applied properly, should make a pretty good isolation primitive.